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Google Glasses

The glasses will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby.

Sign me up. I need help like this to avoid embarrassing myself when I run into friends away from science fiction conventions and can’t resort to scanning their name badges.

What you see is being called a “Terminator-style display,” after the visuals used in the movie to simulate what happens in Ah-nold’s head when the robot is faced with a decision.

John W. Campbell loved it when his writers fully extrapolated the consequences of their science fictional ideas and would have applauded how the Google development team is thinking about the social and legal implications of their new technology. For example – shouldn’t people be alerted when they are recorded by someone wearing a pair of Google Glasses with a built-in camera?

My first suggestion: Equip the glasses with an inflatable device that deploys like a comic-strip thought balloon and says “I am taking video of you.”

Speaking of fully extrapolating the use of technology, sounds like this commenter on 9to5google has met the Google folks before —

The first time I see an advertisement pop in front of my google goggles I’ll throw them off a cliff.

Incidentally, when Google first came along I only associated the name with the sound-alike large number (googol, with 100 zeros). Nor was that a mistake, since the company’s name derives from the number, mispelled.

I wasn’t sufficiently ancient to have thought of other possibilities, like the 1923 hit tune “Barney Google (with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes)” and the comic strip that inspired it, whose title character, in the words of comics historian Bill Blackbeard, was a “goggle-eyed, moustached, gloved and top-hatted, bulbous-nosed, cigar-chomping shrimp.”